The European Union's executive body says it was hit by a "large-scale" cyberattack that reportedly disabled its access to the Internet for several hours.

Politico cited an e-mail sent to staff of the European Commission (EC) in Brussels by its IT services on November 24 as saying that a distributed-denial-of-service (DDOS) attack "resulted in the saturation of our Internet connection."

Commission spokesman Margaritis Schinas was quoted by Russia's state-owned TASS news agency as saying that no data breach resulted from the incident.

The potential source of alleged attack was not immediately clear.

Politico quoted an EC staffer as saying that the commission's Internet went down "twice, for several hours."

An EC spokesperson told Politico that the attack "has so far been successfully stopped with no interruption of service, although connection speeds have been affected for a time."

The alleged cyberattack came the same day that Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko met with EU leaders for a summit in Brussels.